Nanos Valaoritis

Over the years I have done various posts concerning  the outstanding and delightful Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis who died last Friday age 98. XAPA!

Three Caravan Cities

My copy of the 1945 edition.

Three Caravan Cities - Petra - Jerash - Baalbek - and St Catherine's Monastery Sinai by Paul Gotch was published by Whitehead Morris in Alexandria in 1945.  With photographs, maps and text it tells of journeys made during the war by Paul and his wife and friends.  And it carries a brief introduction by Lawrence Durrell who with his girlfriend Eve Cohen shared the upper floor of the Villa Ambron in Alexandria with Paul and others working for the British Council.

Now Paul's son Adam Gotch has reproduced the original in an enlarged format and has added further photographs taken by Paul at the time.  And other curiosities such as the letter reproduced here from the head of the British Council to Paul for going where it was thought he should not have gone.

For more information you can contact adamgotch@mac.com

Adam's 2019 edition.

Paul and Billy Gotch.

Alexandria in Greek Memory

Patakis in Athens have just published Alexandria: City of Memory in a fresh translation.

Remembering Alexandria

Maria and Rafaella

Seven years ago I did a blog post on Alexandrian women.  Now out of the blue I have received an email from the daughter, Sylvia Mikkelsen, of one of the women pictured in that post.

With Sylvia's permission I post her email here.

What a surprise to see my beautiful, young mother staring right back at me from your blog under the caption ‘Alexandrian Women.’  She is the one in white. I had been trying to read up on the Aleksandrinke and there you were, both of you! I knew you, of course, through your wonderful Alexandria: City of Memory, a book I had bought years back when Louisa, my grandchild, was born. I knew that the day would come when she would be asking questions about whether I was Egyptian, being born in Alexandria, or why in the world would her great grandmother come from Slovenia (of all places), and her great grandfather from the Levant –  and where was that, anyway?? Oh, we still say the Levant because if we say Lebanese, there are other  connotations today – and why do you speak English and French? – well, my father decided I should have an English education and my sister a French one, and Christian Lebanese people speak mostly French, etc. etc. There would be a lot of oral tales about my background, naturally. Yet, your book would give her all the necessary cultural and historical background as well as your great insight into the strange and mysterious world that was our Alexandria, a place that only exists in the memory of people who lived there. Not to mention the enriching literary parts concerning Durrell and Forster! She is today sixteen, and is the spitting image of my mother, Rafaella. She looks very often in your book, where I point out on the map the different tram stations on this narrow strip of land where we  lived so well,  between the marshes and the Mediterranean.

A propos the photo, Rafaella is together with her sister, Maria (in the dark dress). It is a strange photo, or part of a photo where there were two other Slovene girls together with them, if I remember correctly. It reflects the two extremes in the lot that awaited most of these girls in their fatidic journey to Alexandria.  Maria arrived a few years before her younger sister to earn some money to send back to Gradisce – a village at the foot of the Carso hills, a few kilometers from Gorizia – where she had left a husband, two children, only to come back home years later, after the war, to be abused and insulted by her husband who called her the Alexandrian whore. My mother, on the other hand, found her husband almost immediately.  She was barely eighteen and worked as a governess for the Ada’s only child, a girl who adored my mother for years and years to come (we, her daughters, were quite jealous of this relationship!). The Ada were a wealthy Jewish family who treated Rafaella as a daughter. Their neighbour, a  Lebanese young man of a bit less than twice her age, observed her from his balcony and fell madly in love with her. He was to be our father. They had a happy marriage and my father and mother are buried  in the beautiful cemetery in my mother’s village. With Nasser, they left Alexandria, first to Lebanon, later to Switzerland, and finally to Slovenia where they spent their summers, and shared their winters between Denmark, at my place, and Geneva, my sister’s. 

Et voilà, the story behind the girls, one in dark and the other in white.I am sorry for this long-winded mail but that is how Alexandrians are, n’est-ce pas?

Oh, I have almost forgotten. I have a story to tell but do you think it would be worthwhile? Rafaella’s first cousin, Elda, was a governess – not to a child – but to none other than Lee Miller who was for a short period of time Aziz Eloui Bey’s second wife. After Lee deserted Eloui (there are several versions of who left whom), Elda - who was also my godmother - married Aziz Eloui, like a true Jane Eyre. We were very close as a family and we had great times, especially at Gharbaniat where Uncle Aziz had one of these fortress-like mansions in the desert. Anyway, practically on her deathbed, years later while she was living in a lovely pink villa close to Trieste, she finally opened up and talked about the long-lasting effects of having interacted with a beauty and personality as wild as  Lee Miller’s.  If I ever venture to write in the genre of a personal essay, perhaps, or anything you would advise me to do, would you kindly read it?  It would be the story of  the paradoxical effects Lee Miller had upon the governess,  a prudish, Catholic, Slovene country-girl, emotions that fluctuated between sheer horror and unconditional adoration. The Alexandrian Governess would be a cross between Jane Eyre, and Daphne du Maurier’s Mrs Danvers. Actually, it seems that du Maurier’s inspiration for Rebecca arose from her years spent in Alexandria (which she intensely disliked) while her husband was stationed there as a marine officer.

I do not know why we, Alexandrians, always have the dream to write, but we do. Probably because we lived in a time warp, and we still cannot come to terms with it.

What the Durrells Did Next

You can also find out what the Durrells did next by reading this book.

End of the Durrells' Corfu Idyll

Corfu town bombed by the Italians in 1941.

The Mirror has run a story on the terrible end of the Durrells' Corfu idyll when the island was devastated by war and some of the family fled for their lives.

Fascists in Corfu

Corfu fascist parade 1933.

The Durrells went to Corfu in 1935, where they seemed able to ignore the darkening political situation in Europe. But judging from this photograph there was already a fascist movement in Corfu two years before the Durrell family arrived.

What I do not know is to what extent this was an indigenous Greek movement or a purely Italian-Corfiot one.  Corfu was long ruled by Venice and Italian influence remained strong.  Italian was the lingua franca of Corfu well into the nineteenth century and the island had an Italian community right up to the Second World War.  Mussolini used this historical connection to twice justify his occupation of Corfu, once briefly in 1923, again in 1941.

Certainly Corfiots courageously protested against the second occupation, a rare thing in Europe at the time, and the island provided the beginnings of the Greek resistance against the 1941-1945 Italian and German occupations of Greece.

The Templars in Turkish

The Templars: History and Myth will be published in Turkey by Kronik
of Istanbul.

This will be the seventh language for this book.

The Durrells in Greek

The family photograph at the top was Gerry's favourite.

The Durrells of Corfu has been translated into Greek and published by Patakis in Athens. The cover shows the Durrells' villa at Sotiriotissa and the family on the terrace: Margo, Nancy, Larry, Gerry and Louisa.  Leslie took the photograph.

At the end of the summer of 1935 the Durrells moved from the Strawberry-Pink Villa at Perama to the Villa Anemoyanni. This was Gerry’s Daffodil-Yellow Villa near Kontokali, at Sotiriotissa, about five miles along the coast road north of Corfu town.

Standing on the side of a hill rising out of the sea, the Daffodil-Yellow Villa was an enormous and neglected Venetian mansion four storeys high, set amidst extensive grounds, overgrown and almost wild, with unkept orange and lemon orchards and olive groves, and with melancholy cypresses and stout arbutus heavy with ripening berries. 

Facing the sea was a stone-paved terrace shaded with a trellis of vines and evergreens from where terraced gardens and a Venetian stairway descended to a wooden jetty projecting from the shore.  A couple of small islands shimmered in the channel and in the distance loomed the hills of mainland Greece and Albania.  To the left was Gouvia Bay, a smooth sheet of water used as a landing place for seaplanes, and beyond that the high hills shouldering Pantocrator, the highest mountain on the island.

Clea Badaro in Australia

Durrell named the fourth volume of his Alexandria Quartet after Clea Badaro.

Recently Simon Parow of Melbourne got in touch, showing me this charcoal on paper drawing by Clea Badaro he picked up at a Sunday market about ten years ago.  The seller told him it was by an Egyptian artist and that is all Simon ever knew.  'I bought it because I liked it.'  

Searching online he found this post of mine which told him something more. 

I have also told Simon about Clea Badaro, 1913-1968: sa vie, son oeuvre, by her sister Jeanne Engalytcheff-Badaro.

And I cover her in my book Alexandria: City of Memory, her studio at the Ambron villa, her connection with the Atelier, her acquaintance with Durrell, and comments from my interviews with some people who knew her.  

Mountolive at Lisbon Airport

Still flying high: Mountolive, the third volume of The Alexandria Quartet,
for sale on a Lisbon airport book rack.

Early February London Snow

The recent fall of snow in London was photographed by a friend, not the usual view from the streets but over the city's hidden gardens.

Postcards of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition

In a previous post about the origins of the London area called White City I mentioned some postcards I had come across of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition.  Here they are.

White City

Vesuvius

Several times in The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell describes Alexandria as the ‘white city’ as in this excerpt from the third volume Mountolive.

A sea-wind chaffered and tugged at the sea-limits of the estuary. Higher still roamed packages of smoking, blood-stained cloud throwing down a strange radiance into the streets and squares of the white city. Rain was a rare and brief winter phenomenon in Alexandria.

Ibrahim Abdel Meguid does the  same in his novel No One Sleeps in Alexandria.

In the evening he told Magd al-Din about the city where he had spent all that time, white Alexandria, where foreigners from all over the world and poor Egyptians from all over the land went.

Alexandria’s whiteness is in contrast to the dustiness of Cairo, a city blown by desert winds, shrouded in sand,  whereas Alexandria glistens with salt crystals from the evening breezes off the sea. 

Which made me think of other cities called white.  Tel Aviv for example and Nicosia which in Greek is called Lefkosia, literally the White Place.

But what about that part of my own city that I never think about at all nor do I ever go there?  That rundown area shoved up against Shepherd’s Bush and amputated from Holland Park and the heart of London by a motorway.  How did White City get its name?

Only recently, seeing a set of striking postcard scenes of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition celebrating the new alliance between the countries did I understand. 

The 1908 Franco-British Exhibition.

The exhibition is indeed a fabulous white city.  And the name was further popularised when the Olympic Games were held next door in the same year.  The 1908 Olympics were meant to be held in Rome but the explosion of Vesuvius caused the Italians to direct their attention to the devastation round the Bay of Naples.  Runner-up London quickly stepped in, a running track was built, and the Olympics and the Franco-British Exhibition ran side by side at what was now indelibly called White City.

1908 White City Marathon.

The exhibition was torn down and the Olympic track given over to dog racing.  Then the motorway finished it off.  But not quite because the BBC built a hideous television studio there which I gather is now protected as a national treasure, and a vast shopping centre has been erected there.  I gather it is even quite trendy to live in White City these days.

BBC Television Studios.

Maybe I should jump on the 31 bus and take a look.

Animals Speak on Christmas Eve

The Durrells in Poland

My book The Durrells of Corfu has now been translated into Polish as Durrellowie z Korfu and published in Warsaw by Noir sur Blanc.

The Durrells in Estonia

Durrellid Korful

The Durrells of Corfu has now been published as Durrellid Korful in Estonia by Eesti Raamat. 

Can Latvia and Lithuania be far behind?

See also the original English-language edition.

The Hotel Cecil in London and Alexandria

About London's Cecil from today's Telegraph:

'One of the best contemporary descriptions can be found in Nathaniel Newnham-Davis’s 1914 book, The Gourmet’s Guide to London. 

'He explains how the bustling courtyard at the Hotel Cecil’s entrance, known as “The Beach”, was a popular hangout for American guests who preferred it to the gilded parlours within. “The most American spot in London” was filled with cane chairs, piles of luggage, a newspaper stall, and “in the summer-time pretty girls sunning themselves and waiters hurrying to and fro with cold drinks and long straws”.'

See here for more of this article in The Telegraph.

And see here for the Cecil in Alexandria.